by D. M. Nash
However, I did have the presence of mind to wonder where Richard was in all this. He must know something wasn’t quite right.
“How do you know the method my boys planned to use to kill her?” the woman asked again, pressing me with her oddly irresistible words.
“Because my dad is…” I tried to hold my jaw shut. It was like trying to close my mouth mid-yawn. Not easy or pleasant, and ultimately impossible. “My dad is a hunter.”
I’d broken out in sweat from the effort, but I still didn’t really feel like anything was wrong.
“Ahh,” the woman said, her face lighting up. “Now the pieces are coming together. I didn’t think we’d have that problem here. Just goes to show what I know.”
Suddenly, without really knowing I was going to, I said, “Richard!” I’m not quite sure how to describe how I was able to do it, but I tricked myself into not thinking for a moment. Not thinking in the way she wanted me to. I told myself I was calling out to Richard not because I was in danger, but because it would be rude not to introduce him to my guest, and it worked. I said his name.
But, it seemed my little triumph over the woman wasn’t reaping any fruits. He still didn’t come.
“Who’s Richard?” she asked earnestly.
Okay, I’d stepped out of her horrible spell enough to at least be able to fight against it. I couldn’t stop my mouth from moving, and I couldn’t keep from telling the truth, but at least I could choose my own answers.
“He’s a friend of mine.”
“Can you be more specific?” she said this in a practiced way that revealed how often she had said this. Probably when her interviewees got confused she would use this tactic to get them back on track.
Struggling against the workings of my own mouth, I slowly answered, “He… is… nineteen and… and I think he’s… pretty cute…” Hmm. I guess I kind of wished I hadn’t divulged that little tidbit, but it was the only thing I could think of that didn’t directly relate to him being a hunter or a vampire.
“What are you not telling me?” she demanded, holding my chin in her hand, playing the angry mother to my petulant child.
Her eyes blazed with indignance as I answered her by saying, “A… lot… of… things… actually…”
Finally, like the hero in an action movie, Richard burst into the room from my bedroom. I say “like in an action movie” because it felt suspiciously like he’d waited until the last possible moment to come save my skin. Even with the rush of relief I felt seeing him like this, I had to wonder what the hell had taken him so long.
“Alright,” he said to the woman. “I think it’s about time for you to leave.”
“And who are you?”
I definitely didn’t expect her tricks to work on him, and I could tell Richard didn’t either, so there was real shock on his face when he said, “I’m Richard Walden.”
She smiled. “What is the one thing you don’t want me to know about you?”
He said, “That I’m terrified of you.”
XVIII
Now it was her turn to be shocked. “That’s not what I meant!”
She tossed me to the ground, and I found out then that whatever creatures these things were, they were the way-stronger-than-a-human-being variety. (Which, by the way, is one of my biggest pet-peeves when dealing with this supernatural stuff. Why are humans so frickin’ weak compared to just about everything else?) My head smacked into the floor so hard it felt like a layer of carpet between me and the hardwood beneath might as well have not been there.
“Argh!” I cried, sitting up and clutching my head in my hands as if I had an ice-cream headache.
She was on him in an instant, getting bigger, her arms got longer, hairier, thicker at the biceps. She was slashing at him, and from the grunts he was making I gathered that it didn’t feel like a Swedish massage. I caught a look at her jaw, and I couldn’t really understand what I was seeing until it clicked. Her jaw was unhinging.
Okay… like, WTF?
I scrambled up, but the knock I’d taken made me stumble and head back down to the floor. If I walked away with a concussion from this, I was not going to be a happy camper.
I forced myself back on my feet, more as a feat of willpower than actual bodily capability. In the kitchen, under the sink, was one of the weapons that worked with most things, most of the time. Our go-to when it came to unknown creatures: A can of bug-spray with a lighter taped to the side, known in some circles as a very unsafe flamethrower.
“Please don’t burn down the house,” I chanted to the spray can, rejoining the fray. “Please don’t burn down the house.”
I ripped the lighter off the can, and, in the way I’d practiced more than a few times before, set the stream of spray to the flame.
FOOM.
There was a joke/urban legend in the hunter community that ROAGER brand bug spray knew exactly who their target consumer was. Pretty much everyone used ROAGER for this, since it blasted out farther and stronger than you’d ever need for applying it to yourself. Not only that, but a lot of hunters seemed to think there was something helpful in the actual anti-bug chemicals and would really take any bug spray over, say, hair spray or spray-on deodorant.
“Get off!” I screamed and I brought the flame down onto the creature—no longer what I would really consider a woman or a human being.
She’d changed further since I left the room, with more hair and longer limbs all around, but she didn’t look like a werewolf or anything like that. Her trendy clothes had been torn to strips by the metamorphosis, and some clung to her while others had fluttered to the floor. I didn’t know what to make of her. Her face was by far the most disturbing thing about her, with jaw unhinged like a snake’s, and her eyes morphed into two huge, long ovals framing either side of her. I really wished Dad was there, but that probably goes without saying.
The thing screamed in pain under the licking flames, and I had to grin. I’d heard my dad say more than once: Dogs may be man’s best friend, but fire is for hunters.
“Ha!” Richard took advantage of the creature’s distress, sucking his legs up to his chest, and then kicking out powerfully.
The creature went flying back, its hair sizzling like wicks, into the corner. Throwing its head back, it made a sound somewhere between howl, moan, and hiss, and then burst through the door, literally snapping it from its hinges. It (she?) then took off down the road, where a car braked for it (her?) so abruptly I had to hope the people inside hadn’t gotten whiplash.
“The door!” I yelled. There was no way to avoid people seeing the creature, but it was moving so fast they could probably be convinced it was some kind of wild animal. However, if somebody saw it burst through my door…Well, not only would that make it harder to dismiss as an animal, but it would tie us to the thing.
Richard, thankfully, understood. He was the child of a hunter, too, after all. He leapt to his feet, even though I could tell he was beat up pretty bad, and leaned the door against the frame, lining it up as best he could.
“We should try to stop your dad from coming in this way,” he said. “Maybe motion him around back when he shows up.”
“Okay,” I said, but I was only half-listening to him. The shock of what had just happened was setting in. She’d come here to kill me. She’d thought I was alone. She was going to suck as much information out of me about my dad and my situation as she could, not to mention the energy that gave me life…
And then she was going to kill me.
It was terrifying, and I couldn’t seem to wrap my head around it. She’d wanted me dead. I didn’t even realize I’d sat back on the floor, my legs folding at odd angles at the knees.
“Are you okay?” Richard rushed to my side, crouched, inspected my face and hands.
“Me?” I said and laughed because he was bleeding from about a dozen places.
XIX
Things were kind of tense until my dad came home. I was really worried that any moment a neighbor, or worse—a
policeman—would be knocking at the door, asking us why a hell-beast had just come storming out of here. I had the news on, muted but with subtitles, and I was scanning radio stations for any mention of it. A few people had seen it and—wouldn’t you just know it—they thought it was a wolf.
Really, that woman looked nothing like a wolf after her transformation, but people see what they want to see. It’s so much easier to tell yourself, “It was just a wolf,” than to really face the idea that there’s stuff out there you don’t know about and can’t comprehend. It could be frustrating to those of us on the inside, but it also made keeping our heads low a lot easier than it would be otherwise, so I guess that’s the trade-off.
At least, that’s what I would have thought of all this before getting that letter from the Association. What had it said again?
Our goal is to determine how it is possible that the general world has not yet determined with conclusiveness the existence of the supernatural.
The Association had made it sound like this was a big deal to them. And more than that, that they really didn’t have an answer. It was a fascinating problem, but at the moment there was a more pressing matter to deal with.
I wanted to ask Richard what he’d been waiting for, why he hadn’t come out to help me with the fight sooner, but he’d taken guard at the window, waiting for the first sign of my dad so that he could tell him to come in through the back door, and his posture and position didn’t really make for easy conversation.
At about 8:00 pm I put a frozen pizza in the oven and started to get worried.
“What do you think is keeping him?” I asked.
“I’m sure he’s fine.”
The smell of the food made me realize how hungry I was, and it also made me think of something else.
“Um… Richard?”
“Yes?”
“Do you need to eat?”
At this, he looked at me, but only for a moment. His gaze went right back to the street as he said, “The pizza will be fine.”
Now, I knew he was a sunner, but I also knew it wasn’t quite that simple. Yeah, they could digest food more or less like a person, but it didn’t last them forever. And his body was healing right now, repairing itself from the damage that thing had done to him, and I knew that used up his stores of blood.
“It’s okay,” I told him. “I’ve done it before.”
Another look, but no reply. He looked back at the street.
“I told you I have a friend who’s a vampire. I mean, I don’t see her much, but when we were in Florida I did, a lot.”
“And she fed off you?” he said. I could tell he didn’t have a high opinion of her, even though he hardly knew her. Great, just what I needed, two guys in my life who didn’t like Victoria.
“No. Not a lot. Twice. Emergencies, both times.”
“It hurts,” he said, as if I hadn’t just told him I’d done it twice. “In movies they always make it look like something… I don’t know… pleasurable. It isn’t like that.”
“I know. I’m not offering because I think it’s going to be fun.”
“I didn’t say you were, I just—”
“You need blood, and I’d rather you take it from me than from some stranger who can’t say yes or no one way or another, even if you can make them half-forget about it.”
He turned his whole body this time, and I saw the stiffness in it. He wasn’t just standing still as death because he didn’t want to miss the moment my dad came in; he really was in bad shape from the fight.
“Please,” I said. “You were taking those slashes because I was in danger. I’d feel a lot better if you just took some blood and we got it over with.”
He didn’t continue arguing. He didn’t make a heavy sigh or shake his head or call me a dumb girl, like Victoria might have done. He just moved, stiffly but swiftly to my side and said, “Are you sure?”
“Just do it. It’s the anticipation I don’t like. It’s like a shot at the doctor. Waiting is always worse than the real thing. Just—”
And then his left arm was around my back, and his right hand was tipping and cradling my head at the perfect feeding angle. If I didn’t know better I’d have said he’d had years of practice at this.
There was a moment of total stillness with me in his arms.
And then his teeth went in.
I hadn’t even seen them yet, they were retracted most of the time, and it was weird to feel them before laying eyes on them.
It did hurt, and I winced against the pain of it, even as his saliva numbed the flesh of my neck. But it wasn’t only pain I felt. His lips against my neck…
I’d only ever been “kissed” like that a couple of times. Both times had been in Florida. One boy I knew because my dad had helped his family with a poltergeist, and the other one I met at the beach one summer and we’d hung out a few nights in a row. Neither of those “relationships” had been serious enough for me to consider them my boyfriends, and things had just kind of fizzled out with each one.
This was completely different, and not just because of the involvement of fangs. I wanted his lips on me for more reasons than to just experiment or kill the time. Now don’t get me wrong, I wasn’t thinking about going all the way or anything, just that… it would have been nice if this moment could have been a bit more than a transferal of nutrients.
And also that two sharp stakes of bone hadn’t just gone into my neck.
It didn’t last long, which meant he really didn’t take much, but it lasted long enough for me to feel how utterly different it also was from the times Victoria had done it. And that meant there simply had to be more going on between him and me than just being “buddies.”
Right?
He pulled away and I got a dishrag to press up against my neck. It’s funny how, in movies and stuff, this never happens after one of the “passionate” bites. True, these wounds would close up on their own, but in the meantime they would make a mess of my dress and the floor that I didn’t really see any need for.
Richard went to the bathroom to wash some of the blood off from his wounds. When he returned, taking his place back at the window, I could tell he was already feeling better. I wondered if Dad would even realize right off the bat that he’d been in a fight.
“Sorry,” he said, instantly annoying me.
“Don’t be.”
It was like, Hello? Dude? I practically begged you to do this. But whatever. Maybe if I were in his situation I would feel bad about it too. Who knows?
Anyway, the pizza was ready soon and we each had a slice, Richard never once leaving his vigil.
It was about 9:15, and I was finishing up using the restroom, when Dad finally pulled into the driveway.
XX
Richard successfully waved him around back, saving my dad the Candid-Camera-meets-Livestream moment of opening the door only to have it fall on top of him.
“There’s pizza,” I said, and gave him a hug around the waist.
This might seem a little odd, mentioning the food before asking how his hunt had been or if he was okay, but in a hunter family you got used to that kind of thing. If you could see someone that meant they were okay, unless they were possessed or something, in which case they wouldn’t tell you the truth anyway. After a tense day, “Are you okay?” was an inane question, especially when compared to, say, the availability of food.
With the three of us at the table—which felt somehow blasphemous to me, like Richard was suddenly the long-lost big brother I’d never known—Dad told us what had happened.
Through the morning and afternoon he’d tracked the black suits. They started knocking on doors more selectively, slowing their whole process. At every house the person either didn’t answer or they chose not to go in for some reason.
“They were wasting your time,” Richard said. “Leading you around so you wouldn’t come home.”
“What?” Dad said.
“We’ll get there when it’s our turn. I was just thinking o
ut loud. What happened after that?”
“What happened next makes more sense to me now, if they were just killing the time. Next they drove way out of town on that state road that leads dead-west.”
Yeah, like I had any idea what road he was talking about, but Richard nodded.
“They knew I was behind them and they knew I knew. I thought something was going to happen, some kind of confrontation, but after about an hour they turned tail and drove back to town. Then they parked at that closed-down Sears, and I just watched them for a couple more hours, but when I got the hint that they simply weren’t going anywhere until I did, I came home.” He took a huge bite out of his warmed-over pizza slice. “What can I say? I was hungry. Sounds like you guys had a bit more adventure on this end?”
There was a weird quality to Dad’s voice. He was acting so cavalier about my “adventure,” but I knew it was tearing him up inside to think I’d been in danger when he wasn’t here to help me. I’m sure it didn’t help that what protection I did have came in the form of a vampire.
Honestly I was still kind of shocked that my dad was still putting up with Richard at all, but I wasn’t complaining. In fact, I was impressed that he was able to be the bigger man about it.
Richard said, “Someone came here.”
“Not a black suit?” he asked, swallowing a bit too hard.
I said, “Well, I think she’s the same kind of creature as those guys, but no she wasn’t in a black suit. She had on a blouse and slacks.”
“She, huh?”
“She told me the black suits were her ‘boys’ and wanted to know how I knew what they were. Basically she was drilling me with questions. You know, their MO.”
My dad’s chewing slowed and he looked at the table, but to his credit he didn’t freak out or anything. He didn’t demand that we move away like he’d wanted. He didn’t ask me if I was alright, which I appreciated because it made me feel like more of a hunter.
